The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

After raking the Irish Times over the coals for screwing up
the headline it tacked onto the Reuters story about the alleged intrusion of a
Chinese military aircraft into Japanese airspace by calling a Y-8 turboprop a “fighter
plane”, I was…interested? bemused? incensed? to see AP run its story with the fighter plane characterization in the body of the text.As in:

Tokyo expressed unease Thursday
over Chinese military and maritime activity near disputed islands that Japan
controls, as China defended a flight by one of its fighter jets near Japanese
airspace.

I think it was a flub by AP, though I would be interested to
find out if the reporter was simply passing on an incorrect? misleading? dishonest?
characterization by a Japanese government official.

Was it a fighter plane to begin with, and initial Japanese
government statements got it wrong?Or
was it a turboprop, which is now turning into a “fighter jet” in order to give the
story some more legs?Inquiring minds
want to know.

For military aviation enthusiasts, Wikipedia tells us that
the Y-8 turboprop, when converted to an airborne early warning aircraft, is
called the KJ-200 Balance Beam.Why “balance
beam”? Ask a gymnast. Here is a picture I found on the
Internet of this fearsome armament:

Doesn’t look much like a fighter jet.

Anybody get a picture of the Chinese
intruder?The great thing about maritime
confrontations is that there’s nobody out there except the Japanese Self
Defence Forces, so the Japanese government has near total control of the stories
that come out.

As I reflect on the ongoing Senkaku/maritime saga, I am
increasingly of the opinion that Prime Minister Abe welcomes tensions with
China because it gives him a pretext to expand? exceed? the boundaries of the
pacifist constitution with new missions and capabilities for the Japanese
military without the need to make difficult explanations to the U.S. government
and Japan’s neighbors about his manifest desire to transform the Japanese
military into a strategic asset: one that not only intimidates and deters Japan’s
neighbors and gives Japan the necessary capability and credibility to construct
and lead alliances of lesser regional states, but also turns Japan into a
self-sufficient and independent actor in the Asian security game: one that can dare ignore or defy the United States, and perhaps even use its unilateral capabilities
to force the U.S. to either endorse its actions, follow them…or get out of the
way.

So aggressive Japanese government spin about Chinese
intentions and actions that push the boundaries of plausibility and truth are
to be expected.

As to whether Japan would actively foment or misrepresent
confrontations with China, well, for now I leave that interesting question to
the intrepid journos of the leading media outlets.

Now that Shinzo Abe’s
LDP has rolled to triumph in Japan’s upper house elections, we can return to
the pressing matter of Chinese and Japanese fingerpointing over the Senkakus
and which nation is the real source of instability in the region—while both
sides nervously look over their shoulders to see which story the U.S. is
inclined to believe.

Today, Japan
declared that a Chinese military aircraft intruded into Japanese airspace:

Japan's Defence Ministry said a Chinese
military aircraft flew through airspace between Okinawa prefecture's main
island and the smaller Miyako island in southern Japan out over the Pacific at
around noon and later took the same route back over the East China Sea.

Guys, the Reuters article you cut and pasted didn’t say that; so where’d that come from?

The Miyako Islands
are about 300 km from Okinawa. That’s a
lot of empty ocean, so it’s not like the PRC airforce was accused of buzzing
Tokyo. However, thanks to its island
possessions, Japan has been able to cobble together a pretty much unbroken
stretch of 12-mile territorial waters (the basis for determining national airspace)
almost down to the Senkakus. And foreign
military aircraft—unlike foreign military vessels—have no rights of innocent
passage through national airspace.

Sun Bin had a very
interesting post on Japan’s impressive territorial water/exclusive economic
zone assets (and also points out that Japan forgoes the 12 mile limit in the
Tsugaru Strait between Honshu and Hokkaido in order to permit US nuclear subs
to transit without “entering” Japan).

On the matter of
China, I believe that the Japanese government is willing to lie about the
details of its confrontation with China, especially in order to serve the
paramount good of managing the all-important U.S. government relationship. I am not making any moral judgments
here. I am simply stating my opinion
based on what I perceive as truth-stretching by Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara
during the first Senkaku crisis in 2010.

Of course, judging
by the “China claims Okinawa” media frenzy of this year and the botch of the airspace
intrusion story (thank you, Irish Times), it doesn’t look like the Japanese
government needs a lot of help.

The PRC is unpopular, unlikable, and has been certified as
being aggressive and unpleasant in its maritime claims. Its state media is unapologetically all about
serving the party and state interest, not the cause of objective journalism. Japan gets a pass because it is perceived as
the nice democracy, the hapless victim of Chinese skullduggery.

Things have changed a bit with the ascendancy of Mr. Abe.

For the first time in a long time, the United States is
concerned about Japanese nationalism championed by Mr. Abe, particularly
because it calls for an independent Japanese security policy and a repudiation
of the U.S. victor’s justice constitution that has constrained Japan’s regional
military activities.

Mr. Abe’s foreign policy stance is all about maximizing
Japanese freedom of movement—while forestalling an open divergence of aims with
the United States.

Therefore, it is important for Japan to appear the injured
party in any confrontation with China…and, I wouldn’t put it past Japan to
orchestrate its own mini Tonkin incident to make sure that the PRC gets caught
out in the most conspicuous and well-documented way possible.

As the Chinese air intrusion incident grabbed the headlines,
the Abe government also started its post-election nibbling at the pacifist
constitution. Per Reuters, reporting on
a story in Yomiuru Shimbun:

Japan is
likely to start considering acquiring the ability to launch pre-emptive
military strikes in a planned update of its basic defense policies, the latest
step away from the constraints of its pacifist constitution.

Apparently the first bite of the apple is the ability to
launch an independent strike against North Korean missile installations, a
capability that the US government, with 28,000 troops in South Korea within
range of North Korean retaliation, probably finds less than enchanting. The South Korean government, already at
loggerheads with the Abe administration, will probably be equally displeased.

Maybe the media minders in the Japanese cabinet decided that
it was a good idea to give the world a two-fer, balancing a piece of unsettling Japanese neo-nationalism with a story about that nasty Chinese boogeyman.

At the same time, China wants to tattle on Abe to the U.S. as
the real source of instability in the western Pacific—a story that the U.S. may
not be disinclined to hear, given the concern that Abe is pursuing a strategy
of polarization with China that may be good for Japan, but not great for the
United States.

I’m not saying the PRC won’t act like jerks and step over
the line in the matter of the Senkakus. And
maybe they did send a turboprop rumbling over a meaningless stretch of Japanese
ocean in order to yank Tokyo’s chain and try to get Japan to over-react. I’m just saying I’ll give as much credence to
a Chinese denial as a Japanese accusation if and when an incident occurs.

Perhaps I am unwilling to cut Mr. Abe slack because of his affinity
for Dick Cheney, whom I regard as a ruthless, no-holds-barred "virtuous conspirator" who regarded the media as a tool of propaganda and misinformation that
was ripe for manipulation.

For the entertainment of readers, I provide a partial history
of neocon hijinks relating to China during the George W. Bush administrations—with
a final twist of Abe.

George W. Bush, like his father, George H.W. Bush, had no
particular axe to grind vis a vis the PRC.
However, the Bush administration’s eminence gris (or noir, if you
prefer) for foreign policy, Vice President Richard Cheney, was perhaps the most
committed and determined high-ranking advocate of existential confrontation
with the People’s Republic of China since Douglas MacArthur.

In
2006, in the American Prospect, Robert Dreyfuss described the Cheney outlook on
the People’s Republic of China, based on the account of Colin Powell’s Chief of
Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson. Dreyfuss
wrote:

Two of the people
most often encountered by Wilkerson were Cheney's Asia hands, Stephen Yates and
Samantha Ravich. Through them, the fulcrum of Cheney's foreign policy--which
linked energy, China, Iraq, Israel, and oil in the Middle East--can be traced.
The nexus of those interrelated issues drives the OVP's broad outlook.

Many Cheney staffers
were obsessed with what they saw as a looming, long-term threat from China.

...

For the Cheneyites,
Middle East policy is tied to China, and in their view China's appetite for oil
makes it a strategic competitor in the Persian Gulf region. Thus, they regard
the control of the Gulf as a zero-sum game. They believe that the invasion of
Afghanistan, the U.S. military buildup in Central Asia, the invasion of Iraq,
and the expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Gulf states have
combined to check China's role in the region. …

One may speculate
that Mr. Cheney’s determination to keep a threatening thumb over China’s Middle
East oil artery lives on in the Obama administration’s continuing involvement
in the bottomless pit of money, munitions, and misery that is US Middle East
policy, despite the President’s avowed interest in pivoting away from the
Middle East to the peaceful and profitable precincts of Asia.

In another
interview with Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly, Wilkerson recounted the
enthusiasm of the Bush administration neoconservatives for pouring gasoline on the
smoldering embers of US-China confrontation by encouraging Taiwan’s President
Chen Shui-bian—whose Democratic People’s Party reflected the priorities of
Taiwan’s independence-inclined indigenes, rather than the Kuomintang
carpetbaggers who followed Chiang Kai-shek and took over the island in 1949—to
announce Taiwanese independence.

From CQ:

“The
Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was
dispatching a person to Taiwan every week...essentially to tell Chen
Shui-bian...that independence was a good thing.”Wilkerson
said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every
time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security
apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”“This
went on,” he said of the pro-independence efforts, “until George Bush weighed
in and told Rumsfeld to cease and desist [and] told him multiple times to
re-establish military-to-military relations with China.”

Wilkerson’s
account was supported by Douglas Paal, former head of the American Institute in
Taiwan, the de facto US embassy in Taipei.

“In the early years of the Bush
administration,” Paal said by e-mail last week, “there was a problem with mixed
signals to Taiwan from Washington. This was most notably captured in the
statements and actions of Ms. Therese Shaheen, the former AIT chair, which
ultimately led to her departure.”

Therese Sheehan was the previous head of AIT—and was
married to Larry DeRita, Rumsfeld’s chief press flack at the Pentagon. She used
her bully pulpit to push for Taiwan independence and support the credibility of
the DoD approach until Colin Powell demanded her resignation and she was
removed in 2004

In 2007, James
Fallows recounted another anecdote concerning the Cheney China mindset conveyed
to him by ex-US Senator Gary Hart:

[Senator Hart served] as co-chair of the
"U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century," aka the
Hart-Rudman Commission.

Early in 2001, the commission presented a
report to the incoming G.W. Bush administration warning that terrorism would be
the nation's greatest national security problem, and saying that unless the
United States took proper protective measures a terrorist attack was likely
within its borders. …

At the first meeting, one Republican woman on
the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or
later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists.
There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting.
No one else spoke up in support.

The same thing happened at the second meeting
-- discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation,
anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the
looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.

Finally, in frustration, this woman left the
commission.

"Her name was Lynne Cheney," Hart
said. "I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a
military showdown with China today." Not because of what China was doing,
threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the
Administration brought with it when taking office.

Fortunately for the
PRC, as Senator Hart declared, the calamity of 9/11 intervened to shift the
focus of the Bush administration and Mr. Cheney to the Middle East and China
was credentialed as a U.S. partner in the War on Terror. Nevertheless, Mr. Cheney’s right-hand man,
John Bolton, was able to persuade the European Union not to revoke its post
Tian An Men arms embargo against the PRC, a ban which still exists and, as a
memory and warning of the PRC’s near approach to permanent pariah status,
rankles Beijing to this day.

PRC President Hu
Jintao had the misfortune of visiting Washington in 2006, when Vice President
Cheney and his militant faction were riding high. China's role as an
impediment to Bush administration policies on Iran as well as North Korea did
not make for a particularly hospitable environment for Hu's visit.

The protocol-obsessed Chinese
leader suffered a day full of indignities - some intentional, others just
careless. The visit began with a slight when the official announcer said the
band would play the "national anthem of the Republic of China" - the
official name of Taiwan. It continued when Vice President Cheney donned
sunglasses for the ceremony, and again when Hu, attempting to leave the stage
via the wrong staircase, was yanked back by his jacket. Hu looked down at his
sleeve to see the president of the United States tugging at it as if
redirecting an errant child.

Then there were the
intentional slights. China wanted a formal state visit such as Jiang [Zemin]
got, but the administration refused, calling it instead an "official"
visit. Bush acquiesced to the 21-gun salute but insisted on a luncheon instead
of a formal dinner, in the East Room instead of the State Dining Room. Even the
visiting country's flags were missing from the lampposts near the White House.

In addition to his sunglass-donning
transgression, Cheney also had to deny he had marked Hu's Oval Office briefing
by taking a nap in his chair (thereby, perhaps inadvertently, leaving the
impression that he had actually chosen to feign sleep in order to show his
contempt for the Chinese leader).

The capper to the disastrous visit was the outburst during Hu’s speech on the
White House lawn by Dr Wang Wenyi of the Falun Gong spiritual practice
movement, who gained access to the speech as a credentialed correspondence.

US news reports first concentrated on Dr. Wang’s dire—and legally more
problematic statements—along the lines of “President Hu, your days are
numbered!”
Subsequent reports concentrated on the more civil disobedience-styled Let My
People Goisms such as “President Bush, stop him from persecuting Falun Gong!”.
More recent reports merely described Dr. Wang as “pleading with Bush to stop
the Chinese president from persecuting the Falun Gong”.
Ming Pao reported more categorically that Dr. Wang declaimed in a piercing voice,
shouting exhortations such as “Heaven will destroy the Chinese Communists”,
“Leave the Party”, “10 million heroes have left the party, when will you
leave?”, “Judge Jiang Zemin, Luo Gan, Zhou Yongkang” and “Falun Practice is
Great”.

The
Secret Service did not cover itself in glory, as Milbank described:

90
seconds into Hu's speech on the South Lawn, the woman started shrieking,
"President Hu, your days are numbered!" and "President Bush,
stop him from killing!"

Bush and Hu looked up, stunned.
It took so long to silence her - a full three minutes - that Bush aides began
to wonder if the Secret Service's strategy was to let her scream herself
hoarse. The rattled Chinese president haltingly attempted to continue his
speech and television coverage went to split screen.

The
revelation that the White House had granted Dr. Wang a temporary press pass in
the name of the Epoch Times probably did not elicit a forgiving shrug from the
Chinese government.

The Epoch Times, extensively distributed in the United States as a free
newspaper, was widely known as the organ of the Falun Gong, which had been at
loggerheads with the Chinese Communist Party ever since the Chinese government
suppressed its practice as subversive in 1999.

Dr. Wang was
not a journalist by profession. She was a pathologist, and the lead researcher
on Falun Gong's hot-button issue--the alleged vivisection of Falun Gong
practitioners by the Chinese government at a facility in Shenyang, and the sale
of their organs for transplant purposes.
And, beyond Falun Gong’s well-known hostility to the Chinese Communist Party
and Dr. Wang’s central role in Falung Gong’s most impassioned crusade against
the Chinese regime, her prior personal history of confronting Hu Jintao was a
matter of public record.

More
Milbank:

But as protocol breaches go, it's hard to top the heckling of a foreign
leader at the White House. Explaining the incident -- the first disruption at
the executive mansion in recent memory -- White House and Secret Service
officials said she was "a legitimate journalist" and that there was
nothing suspicious in her background. In other words: Who knew?

Hu did. The Chinese had warned the White House to be careful about who was
admitted to the ceremony. To no avail: They granted a one-day pass to Wang
Wenyi of the Falun Gong publication Epoch Times. A quick Nexis search shows
that in 2001, she slipped through a security cordon in Malta protecting Jiang (she
had been denied media credentials) and got into an argument with him.
[emphasis added]

It
is difficult to avoid the suspicion that somebody in the White House press
office thought it might be a fun prank to throw Hu together with a Falun Gong
activist.

"It's hugely embarrassing,"
said Derek Mitchell, a former Asia adviser at the Pentagon and now an analyst
at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

China "must know that this Bush administration is good at controlling
crowds for themselves, and the fact that they couldn't control this is going to
play to their worst fears and suspicions about the United States, into mistrust
about American intentions toward China."

Mr. Cheney further
earned PRC mistrust by pursuing a North Korea regime change policy whose scope
threatened, either by intention or design, to undermine the PRC’s access to the
global financial system. In a lengthy
process that began in 2005, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned and sent
into receivership a small Macau bank, Banco Delta Asia—whose owner, Stanley Au,
was a well-connected figure in Beijing--on rather dubious evidentiary grounds
that it had acted as a conduit for North Korean money laundering. In testimony before Congress, an
administration figure responsible for the strategy asserted that the BDA
sanction was a threat directed at the People’s Bank of China—“killing the
chicken to scare the monkey”--to cease its relations with North Korea or else
suffer the same fate.

In another lucky
break for the PRC if not the rest of the world (there is no evidence of
coordination between Beijing and Pyongyang), North Korea detonated a nuclear
weapon in October 2006 to demonstrate its extreme umbrage at the United States;
the shock brought the Cheney program to a screeching halt.

Vice President
Cheney suffered the indignity of having his foreign policy team sidelined in
favor of moderates favored by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Nevertheless, in 2007 Mr. Cheney journeyed to
Asia and personally attempted to will an anti-China alliance of the United
States, India, Japan, and Australia into existence--in defiance of Bush administration
policy, as Australia’s News Corp reported:

Australia has been approached to dramatically
upgrade its three-way security arrangements with Japan and the US to include
India in a four-way security agreement that would encircle China.

The Japanese Government and US Vice-President Dick Cheney are keen to include
the growing economic and military power of India in the already enhanced
"trilateral" security arrangements, locking together the three most
powerful democracies of the Asia-Pacific region.

Mr Cheney gave the Japanese proposal new life
on his recent visit to Japan and Australia after sections of the Bush
administration rebuffed the plan.

…

Mr Cheney's backing for the plan, which is
understood to be strongly supported by the new Japanese Prime Minister, came
only two weeks before Tuesday's signing of a historic security declaration
between Japan and Australia.

That declaration put security, intelligence and military relations on the
highest level they have been since World War II.

The disclosure of Mr Cheney's support for a
plan that would close the back door on China is likely to cause deeper concern
in Beijing, which is already accusing the US of attempting to contain its
growth and influence.

Readers
tempted to dismiss Mr. Cheney’s Asian odyssey as the quixotic gesture of a
disgraced has-been will be interested to learn that the Japanese prime minister
in 2007 who so strongly supported the China containment initiative was none other than Shinzo Abe, during his first, brief, and disastrous
administration.

During his 2012 political campaign, Mr. Abe affirmed his vision of a U.S.-Japan-India-Australia "diamond" containing China. His most striking and successful foreign policy initiative since taking office (other than deepening Japan-China enmity) has been obtaining the enthusiastic endorsement of a Japanese-Indian security partnership by Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh.